Saturday, August 23, 2008

Hitting a snag with SurveyMonkey

I have just used SurveyMonkey for the first time to gather feedback on the blogging workshops I was running with Lyn Blair. The survey was very easy to develop and from what I could see, it was easy to fill out.

What to do with the resultsIt is also very easy to see the results, but I have hit a snag now that I have come to download the results and share them with Lyn. It is possible to download and share results, but to do so you have to upgrade your account and start paying a fee. The only other way I can share the results is by letting Lyn have access to my account, or print off pages of questions and replies. I have to say that I am really disappointed about this because SurveyMonkey is a lovely program to use.

So if you have an answer to this problem or suggestions for other free online survey tools I could try, please let me know.

9 comments:

There are several alternatives:1. Upload the reports to either Google Docs, Zoho Share, or Skydrive. You can make them public, restricted or private. You could also convert them to pdf before uploading.2. Another survey tool is Survey Gizmo (www.surveygizmo.com) which is free for up to 250 responses per month and creates some wonderful graphs.3. Add them to a wiki.

Thanks for the suggestions, Bill - I'll have a look at surveygizmo - does it generate reports free of charge?.

The trouble with your other suggestions is that Surveymonkey does not generate a report that I can download without me having to pay for it. So I am going to have to make up my own report by a lot of copying and pasting, which is inconvenient to say the least. Once I have done that, then I'll be able to email/blog the report to Lyn and the participants.

Hi Sarah, it won't help you this time, but the Google Docs 'forms' feature allows you to set up surveys; the results of which are stored on a Google spreadsheet. No reports, but I suspect you could generate them from the spreadsheets. I haven't tried using it yet, but plan to next week with my blogging session. Perhaps some of your readers have experience using Google Docs this way and could comment?

What I have ended up doing is cutting and pasting the results into a Google document - turning the document into a pdf file - storing the pdf on Internet Archive and then linking it into my next blog post. Very time consuming and frustrating. Nest time I'll have a play with some other ideas like the ones you and Bill have just suggested.

I am planning to use Survey Monkey for qualitative feedback after each session of an online class I am teaching that begins next week. I was not planning to keep the results, but some of these issues are useful to begin considering.

I am wondering if SnagIt's text capture feature may also work?

Additionally, I am wondering if there is a survey where results will need to be kept if it is possible to pay for Survey Monkey then on a month-by-month basis to be able to export the results, and then drop back down to the free version?

Sarah Stewart

Welcome to my blog which is a mix of talk about stuff that takes my fancy. My views are my own and not necessarily of my employer, the Australian College of Midwives. I am always really interested to hear your thoughts and feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment at any time.